The Turkish Village Coffeehouse as a Social Institution

Abstract

T IURKISH villagers have long met together socially in guest rooms maintained by influential men, but this custom is waning. Among the factors in the decline of the private guest room in favor of the public coffeehouse have been population increase, greater movement of persons between villages, the weakening of the old patterns of social stratification, and the transition from a self-sufficient agriculture to one that is commercially oriented. The coffeehouse is one response to widespread changes in the rural social and economic structure, and the regional contrasts evident in coffeehouse distribution raise questions about the basis and spread of such changes. Although the coffeehouse has penetrated rural Turkey only recently and partially, it is a much older feature of the Turkish urban scene. Coffee drinking seems to have originated in Arabia and to have spread from there to Egypt and, by the sixteenth century, to the cities of Persia and the Ottoman Empire, where attempts were made on a number of occasions to suppress it. It achieved prominence in the social life of Istanbul during the latter half of the sixteenth century,' though tea appears to have been known for much longer. Then, as now, the teahouses and coffeehouses of Istanbul had their counterparts not only in Anatolian towns but as far afield as Muslim Central Asia and Arab North Africa.2 In all these countries the coffeehouse became the scene of smoking, entertainment, and conversation. Even Shah Abbas the Great of Persia is said to have frequented coffeehouses where intellectuals, poets, and others assembled. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries talk of business and commerce became more prominent in the urban coffeehouses of Turkey and the rest of the Middle East. In appearance such meeting places lost the elegance of the past and assumed the drab and unprepossessing aspect of their modern equivalents.3 In Turkey the long established urban coffeehouse (kahve, kahvehane) or teahouse (qayhane, qayevi) is an informal meeting place for men where busi-